The sins of the fathers
by Baeraad
Summary: Catherine listens to the story of another Hunter, and of the monster he believes that he is responsible for creating.
1. Chapter 1

_The journal of Doctor Catherine Faller, entry # 20:_

_There is a kind of Anomaly I've only heard of. They look completely human most of the time, though some Hunters say that sometimes, you can see a grey aura around them, making them look dull and (a commonly used word) "artificial." They tend to be stronger and faster than normal people, but are otherwise normal. Someone once killed one and performed an autopsy. It turns out that they have machinery where their inner organs should be, and silicon chips embedded in their brain tissue._

_The antithesis of the lycanthropes. Not animals passing for humans, ruled by feral wrath. Machines passing for humans, ruled by computer logic._

_Damn, how I envy them. Sometimes I think I'd give anything to never have to feel anything ever again._

---

Mac Brown was old and he had never been handsome. He was a chubby little black man with thinning white hair, and when he smiled he showed two rows of bad teeth. It was a friendly smile, though, and he carried himself with a lot of vitality for a man his age. His clothes were worn, but every rip and tear had been carefully repaired.

"It's very kind of you to buy me dinner, Doctor Faller," he said. He took a bun off the tray of complimentary bread and started making himself a sandwich with careful motions. His hands trembled a bit. "My pension rarely allows me the pleasure of a restaurant as nice as this one."

"I'm a kind person," Catherine said while mentally balancing the cost of feeding this old buzzard with the potential rewards of making friends.

The thing was this – things out of legend and nightmare walked among mankind, abusing them in a thousand different ways with people being none the wiser. These Anomalies had managed to get discredited every attempt to explore the scientific foundations of their existence, so as to keep humanity ignorant and defenceless. Lately, though, some unknown agency had awakened certain people to the truth, turning them into Hunters – the champions of the hapless human race. Catherine was one. Mac, who she had found a few days ago, was another.

To Catherine, any Hunter's sensible course of action seemed perfectly clear. Humanity could adapt to anything, even the existence of Anomalies, if it could turn the scrutiny of its science on it. Therefore, if Hunters managed to expose the truth in a way that made everyone believe them, everything would turn out just fine. That was, thus, what they ought to do. Right?

According to most Hunters Catherine had met, wrong. Most of them thought that alerting the world would be impossible (and that made it different from killing every Anomaly in turn _how_, exactly?). Some said that if this wasn't handled delicately, it'd lead to a witch hunt and the death of countless innocents (hadn't they ever heard of omelettes and eggs?). One had even told Catherine that humanity _deserved_ to be kept in the dark and spared the nightmarish truth that Hunters had to endure (Catherine could have killed the self-pitying bitch right there and then!).

Catherine needed friends, allies, helpers in her chosen quest to save the world. And she had absolutely no talent or skill in getting them. Buying talkative old men dinner was a start, though.

"So how long has it been?" Mac said conversationally. "Since you first Saw?" He started chewing on his sandwich slowly and carefully.

"I've been a Hunter for a month or so," Catherine said. "Saw. Is that what you call it?"

"That's what it is, Doctor Faller," Mac said. "I have never believed in making something more complicated than it has to be. I have a friend, one of us, who talks about being the champions of God and so forth. Pish-tosh. We are people who See. Isn't that enough? I was a journalist – I spent my entire career seeing what was there and telling others. It's important that things are seen."

"And told?" Catherine said hopefully.

"Well." Mac smiled. "As long as you can prove that you're telling the truth."

"I'm going to find proof enough," Catherine said, deciding that a bit of boldness would go down well here. It did, after a fashion, but it didn't rouse the response she had been hoping for. Mac just nodded.

"I wish you luck."

"I could use some help," Catherine prodded.

Mac chuckled.

"My, you are very forward, aren't you, Doctor Faller?"

"It's my thing. So is research, in a lab. Not field work, though. You'd be better for that."

"Perhaps," Mac said. He sighed. "But I'm rather too old and tired to come out of retirement now. No, I think that from me, you will have to settle for one more person who knows you are not insane. One more person who has Seen." He smiled. "One more person you do not need to convince, isn't that enough?"

"Come on." Catherine scowled. People were so damn _tricky_. Chemicals either mixed the right way or they didn't. They didn't need to be talked into it, and they never said that sure, they _could_ mix, but they just didn't feel like it today. "None of us is exactly suited for this – heck, I don't think anyone _could_ be suited for it. The world needs us. All of us."

"The world had thirty years to ask for me to help it while I was young and capable," Mac said. "And while I had more of a stake in it. Most of the things I've wanted to do, I've already done. Most of the people and things I cared about are already gone. I don't have much use for the world anymore. Why should I save it?"

"You're not dead yet," Catherine said sharply. "This is still _your_ world, and the Anomalies are violating it. Isn't there _anything_ you want to change? Isn't there _anything_ you care about?"

For the first time, Mac hesitated.

"There is!" Catherine said. She pointed accusingly over the table. "You're not as happy with the way things are as you try to sound! There's something seriously wrong, even for you!"

Mac sighed, his expression one of strained patience.

"You are really _very_ forward. You're right, there is something, but it's personal. May I ask that you don't inquire further about it?"

"I might be able to help," Catherine said. "Ever think of that? I'm pretty damn resourceful, you know."

"I seriously doubt it."

"Only one way to find out."

Mac looked away sadly.

"Such a pity," he said. "A fine dinner on the way, and I have lost my appetite. It seems one should beware of forward young women bearing gifts."

"But you _will_ tell me." Catherine didn't read people very well, but she recognised the tone of resignation.

"I suppose so. I never was very good at saying no." He looked thoughtful. "That's really the problem, I suppose. None of this would have happened if I had been better at saying no."

"How's that?" Catherine said.

Mac smiled faintly.

"You're a young woman, Doctor Faller. Do you have any regrets about your life so far?"

"I've got a hundred," Catherine said.

"I'm sorry to hear that," Mac said. "I only have two. That's pretty good, wouldn't you say? I'm seventy-six years old, I've been all over the world, I've seen and done everything I've ever wanted, and I only have two regrets. You'd think that would be pretty mild, wouldn't you? You'd think it would mean that I didn't do such a bad job at living." He sighed.

Catherine grimaced. She wasn't interested in other people's self-pity, especially not people who was either more forgiving of themselves than her, or else had more of an impulse control capability than she had. If she could get through a day without assembling another regret, she considered it a pretty good day.

"So what did you do?" she said. "That you think you shouldn't have?"

"Firstly," Mac said, "I let my wife talk me into having a daughter. Secondly, having done so, I was exactly as bad a father as I thought I would be."

"That's your big regret?" Catherine snorted. "Almost everyone has kids, and quite a few of them turn out to be lousy parents. I haven't heard a lot of them admit it, though. Mostly, they just assume there must be something wrong with their kids, since they didn't turn into perfect little copies of them."

"You're a cynic."

"No, I just loathe the way people convince themselves that there's one perfect way to live your life, and then feel sorry for themselves when it doesn't work out for them. _Real _life is full of tough choices."

Mac gave her an amused, thoughtful stare.

"What?" Catherine snapped.

"Or do you just like to tell yourself that the choices were tough," he said, "so that you won't feel as bad about making the wrong ones?"

Catherine's pale cheeks reddened. Mac just laughed.

"There's two ways of looking at everything, Doctor Faller!" he said. "Don't be so quick about judging me. This is another thing I mean about Seeing. It's hard enough to see what is there without having to impose some sort of moral evaluation on it, too." He glanced at an approaching waiter. "Oh look, here's our food."

"Just tell me what this is all about and be done with it," Catherine said as their plates were placed before them. "You never should have had a daughter…?"


	2. Chapter 2

I never should have had a daughter (said Mac).

I never did have much of a nurturing streak. Not because I didn't care about other people, I like to think, but because I just didn't have the patience. I was always heading somewhere else, to see something new, or do something different. When I was young, my friends and family found it charming – at the same time as clucking about how eventually, I would want to settle down, of course.

As I got older, they began to find it less charming, and instead of clucking, they began to mutter about how immature I was, and how I apparently wanted to stay a child forever. I never understood that, you know. As a child, you have to stay where you are and do what people tell you to, and as an adult, you're supposed to develop a desire to root yourself to the spot and fill your days with obligations. Almost like you are only considered grown up when you start wanting to go back to being a child, wouldn't you say?

Either way, my supposed childishness didn't stop me from falling in love… or from being faithful to my wife for fifty years of marriage. Sandra, that was my wife's name. A lovely woman. She deserved better than me, but then, don't most husbands say that about their wives? And I was her choice, regardless of the wisdom of it. She didn't rebuke me for spending so much time away from home. She knew I needed to be on the move to be happy.

But she wanted a child. As company, perhaps. Or, yes, perhaps you're right, Doctor Faller. Perhaps she wanted one because that is what everyone assures us we _should _want, and she had no reason to object to it.

The thought appalled me. It sounds terrible when I say it like that, but they are both of them dead, my wife and my daughter, and it's rather too late in the game for self-deception. To bind my fate to another strong, capable adult was one thing. Sandra's needs, such as they were, were easy to fulfil, and it gave me joy to do so. A child was something quite different. I knew that it would need everything that I could give and everything that I was. I also knew that I was entirely unable to give that much of myself; my own desires were too costly.

I never should have consented. Sandra would not have forced any ultimatum on me – that was not her way. But for that very reason, refusing seemed impossible. What right did I have to deny my wife the one thing she wanted, when she asked so little of me and gave me so much?

Our daughter, Rose, was born one lovely June evening. I think I had hoped that when I at last saw the child of my body, I would be overcome with all the right feelings of fatherhood. You scoff? These things do happen, Doctor Faller. Just because something is a sentimental cliché it doesn't mean it never happens.

Alas, it did not happen this time. All I felt when I held Rose for the first time was confusion and fear. What was this tiny, wrinkled little creature? What did it want with me? I had a vague idea that everything had changed, but at the same time, I felt no different.

In a way, my fears were groundless; my life didn't change very much. I still travelled to far-off nations to see what was there and to write about it. I still lived my life as best I knew how. When I was at home, Sandra was still my loving wife… and if the house now also held an infant, a toddler, a little girl of six, a young woman of fourteen… well, it made no more of an impact on me than having a roommate did in college. She was there, and that was all.

From time to time, Sandra would try to cultivate a relationship between me and our daughter. And I like to think that I tried to cooperate with her efforts… after a fashion. But the girl had little enough to say that interested me, and I had little enough to say that she understood. It is difficult, at least for me, to find common ground with anyone whose intellect and knowledge is so far beneath my own…

You know exactly how I feel? Ah, why do I have a feeling that I was just insulted?

Anyway, I failed. Quite miserably so, I'm afraid. It would have been nice to believe I did the best I could, but that would be another deception. My attempts were half-hearted, born of shame and half-understood obligation. Between that and the frequent absences brought on by my line of work, is it a wonder that by the time Rose was fifteen, she and I were little more than strangers?

By that time, she had started seeking other ways to fill the hole in her life were her father should have been. Every time I got home, Sandra regaled me with new stories of Rose acting out, and of whatever disagreeable boyfriend she had last taken up with. She asked me to talk to the girl sometimes, perhaps feeling that a father's touch was needed – but who was I to provide such an arcane thing? Rose responded to my lectures with nothing but disgust. I must admit I can't blame her for that.

The final result was what it usually is, when a girl goes out of her way not to be sensible. At sixteen, Rose found herself pregnant, and unable to name the father with any degree of certainty. She named her own daughter Daisy. The similarity in names just strengthened my helpless, fatalistic conviction that my granddaughter would share my daughter's fate.

That did not entirely happen, though, or so it seemed. Daisy did not have the easiest time growing up, I think – a number of potential fathers entered and left her life, some of them merely useless, some of them openly abusive, and the money that was present during her childhood consisted of what Rose could scrape together, wheedle out of her current boyfriend, or resentfully bring herself to accept from me and my wife. When she was nine, Daisy already shared at least one trait with her mother; a sullen, resentful look in her eyes, a gleam that judged the world and promised retribution. Even so, where Rose had taken her vengeance on the world by abandoning self-preservation, Daisy took hers by resolving to survive.

She was a remarkable child, Doctor Faller – and I say this though, as you must understand, I have little love for children. She was wild, but there was a focus to her wildness. She would wrap it around her like a coat whenever life treated her badly, and spread it like great, black wings when she pursued something she wanted.

And perhaps with her, I redeemed myself – only slightly, I'm aware, only very slightly – because with her, I managed to have a relationship of sorts. Grandchildren are easier, of course. You are not expected to always be there for them, and you are not expected to raise them to be productive citizens – that's all the parents' work. But it was more than that. I recognised something of myself in Daisy, in that restless spirit of hers. She wanted to know everything I had seen and learned in my life, and I, for my part, found some pleasure in telling her.

When she was eighteen, she walked out of her mother's home and disappeared.

Rose was frantic and Sandra was inconsolable, but I secretly hoped that Daisy would find some adventure in life – and an escape from the legacy of my failures.

The next time I saw her was in a magazine – at the dentist's office, of all places. I was flipping through a collection of dull celebrity stories, waiting for the nurse to call me in so that I could be deprived of one of my few surviving natural teeth, when all of a sudden, there was Daisy, grinning at me from an advertisement page. She was wearing not very much of anything, and looked thin – though no more thin than any other woman who appeared in an ad, I admit – but her eyes gleamed with that same wildness, and with something that resembled triumph. I laughed, then, and was glad that the girl was making her way in the world… but still, that triumph bothered me. I told myself it shouldn't, that Daisy deserved whatever happiness she could wrest out of life, but there was something slightly insane, slightly _gloating_ about the curve of her smile and the lines around her eyes.

She stayed missing for years after that. She didn't turn up at her mother's funeral, when Rose's last bad choice of boyfriend pushed her down the stair and she broke her neck. She _did_ turn up at her grandmother's funeral, two years ago, after my dear wife had suffered a fatal heart attack.

I was standing in the rain after the service had ended, thinking of fifty years with a wife I still didn't think I had ever deserved, and she just appeared next to me, like the rain and the autumn gloom had given birth to her. She wasn't thin anymore, she had developed the pleasant roundness of a mature woman, and she wore a black fur coat that must have cost a fortune.

"I kept meaning to come back," she said conversationally. "To say, you know, thank you for being nice to me when I was a kid. Things kept coming up, though. And I always figured I'd get more chances."

I just stared.

"Sucks, doesn't it, when you run out of chances?" she said.

"Yes," I said. "Hello, Daisy." Then I smiled. "Or should I call you Demetria, these days?" That had been the name she had modelled under. I had been a reporter then, and it had been easy enough to find out.

"Demetria? Oh, that takes me back." She laughed weakly. "I was young. I needed a new name and I figured, the longer and more pretentious, the better."

"So it's Daisy again?"

"Ugh. Never." She grinned. "Everyone needs a little more pretension than _that_ in their life. But I don't mind you calling me that, if you want to."

We went back to my house, and talked for a very long time. She had done a great number of things, it seemed; earned her living in a dozen different ways, studied a number of different fields, met people and lost them. She had been married ("no great-grandbrats for you, though, sorry") and been in love, though never, apparently, both with the same man.

My journalist skills hadn't entirely gone to seed. I could hear all the things she didn't tell me; her stories had gaping holes in them. I considered, idly, what she might have edited out. Drugs, probably – I could not imagined that she had tried everything else life had to offer, and never touched any illegal substances. Crime, fraud, smuggling? Almost certainly something along those lines – she had clearly experienced both wealth and poverty, and she was very silent on how she had gone from one to the other and back again. In fact, I wasn't even willing to rule out terrorism. The few times the topic strayed to the government, or indeed any form of authority, she always seemed to have to force down anger.

Even if I had not noticed the holes in her stories, I would still have known there was something more to her life than the happy-go-lucky vagabond she claimed to be. There was still that gloating triumph written on her face, that smirking lust for ever greater victory over the world. Time had no erased it, merely made it sink deeper into the lines around the eyes and the mouth, infusing it into her very nature. In my granddaughter, my blood and my failures had created something dark and hungry.

What did I do about it? Oh, Doctor Faller, have you heard _nothing_ I have said?

I did nothing about it, of course. I saw, and seeing was enough. Did you think I would change at this point in my life?

And for that matter, I was not entirely discontent. Daisy had darkness in her, yes, but she also had enough love to make herself part of my life again, and to be kind to me. She was not a monster, and she could so easily have become one. The good in her had not been entirely undone, and that in itself was more than I could have hoped for.

Furthermore, she was childless, without any desire to ever become otherwise. And that made me feel relieved, because it meant it would end with her. The river that had flowed from the wellspring of my failures would reach the ocean, and no more pain would come of my legacy.

Sadly, things would turn out not to be as simple as that.


	3. Chapter 3

_The journal of Doctor Catherine Faller, entry # 20 (continued):_

_Why do I always open my big fat mouth? I just can't help myself. It's not some inborn respect for honesty or anything – I can lie easily enough. It's not speaking the truth that's irresistible to me, it's speaking my mind._

_If I were a machine, I wouldn't have such problems. I'd just say whatever I knew was prudent to say, and everyone would think I was a really nice person. If I were a machine, I'd be better at being human…_

_---_

Catherine stared at Mac, her overly expensive tofu steak cooling on her plate.

"Was there anything you wished to say, Doctor Faller?" Mac said peacefully. He picked up a piece of potato with his fork and chewed it carefully.

"You're pathetic," Catherine said. "If the battle of the Apocalypse was being fought right outside, you'd just sit there and eat as long as someone promised to tell you all about it afterwards, wouldn't you?"

"Oh, I'd probably want to watch myself and take notes," Mac said. "I take it you would rush out there and go down fighting?"

"No. Don't be ridiculous." Catherine sniffed. "I'd rush out there and tell the stupid grunts that _did_ fight how to do it properly."

"Ah. Well, to each their own."

"But I'd do _something_! How can you see a problem and not even try to solve it?"

"The problem is usually not solvable," Mac said. "I have kept informed about world events for half a century and more. In that time, I have noticed a very prominent pattern; nothing ever changes. I have seen so many idealists try to change the world, and yet people are still cruel and foolish. I have heard a great many people preach about how we must all embrace the true value of things, and yet money still rules the day. The world doesn't change, Doctor Faller, it just turns."

"Oh, come on, that's nonsense," Catherine said. "What about penicillin? What about chemotherapy? What about X-rays? What about Motrin? What about the _immeasurable_ suffering averted because someone was smart enough to think of something new?"

"Well, I…" Mac blinked. "What's Motrin?"

"It's a painkiller for menstrual cramps."

"You count that in with those other three?"

Catherine gave him the look that men usually receive when revealing their lack of understanding about these things.

"_Yes_," she said in a tone that brooked no argument. "_Yes_, I do. The point is, okay, people never change, but the world they live in do."

"Quite…" Mac said. "It's funny, though, that you brought up medical inventions."

"Well, I'm a biochemist," Catherine said. "Of course that's the first thing that comes to mind. What's so funny about it?"

"You will understand once I tell you little more," Mac said.

---

Over the next few months, Daisy made herself at home in Dougal. She got a job as a secretary, of all things, and rented herself a flat. Meanwhile, she worked her way back into my life. She spent at least a couple of nights a week at my house, and we started to get to know each other again.

That was lucky for me, I suppose. Otherwise I would have had to weather the flu I caught that winter alone. Instead, Daisy turned up one night to find me in bed, so feverish I could barely talk. I remember that she used a number of words that I was sure she had not known when she was eighteen, but while she was cursing, she was checking my temperature, cooling my forehead with a wet rag and making me eat some broth. She made for a decent nurse, no matter how horrible her bedside manner was. In a day or two, I was well enough that I could at least think straight again.

"We all get these little omens of our mortality," I said as I was sitting in bed, pondering a piece of unbuttered toast without much enthusiasm.

"It was just a bug," Daisy said irritably. She was lying on the now-vacant half of the bed, reading a paperback. "Just something that's going around."

"Bugs are a serious matter at my age," I said. "And there's no one to take care of me anymore."

"Ahem."

"Yes, but you can't always be here, and besides, don't you have more important things to do than to nurse my old man's problems?"

"You're not that old." She put down the book and glared at me.

"I'm seventy-five years old."

"There are turtles that live to be two hundred years old."

"That's nice for them," I said. "I, however, am not a turtle."

"No, you're a human being," Daisy said. "Are you going to get beaten by a turtle?" She heaved her legs over the edge of the bed and walked over to my side. "Don't allow this."

"Don't allow what?" I said, perplexed. "Myself to get old?"

"Yes!" She shook a finger at me. "It's stupid, anyway. People shouldn't have to get old. That's a stupid rule."

"Perhaps," I said warily. "But that's just the way it is."

"Says who?"

I really had no idea.

"God?" I suggested.

"Well, He can shut His mouth." She folded her arms and scowled. "Look, what if you didn't have to grow old? What if the rules could be broken? What if _everything_ was negotiable?"

"Even then," I said slowly, "I would be very careful about which rules I broke. What if they're there for a reason? If everyone lived for hundreds of years, we'd run out of room pretty soon."

"We already live longer than we used to," Daisy said. "But there's plenty of room, because with longer lives, people aren't in such a rush to pass their genes along anymore. The world balances itself out."

"Oh? You want to break the rules, and then depend on other rules to protect you from the consequences?" I smiled, though I felt uneasy. "And either way, the discussion is moot. Certain rules _can't_ be broken."

"Yes they can." Daisy's eyes narrowed. "It's just a matter of how badly you want it."

I didn't know what to answer to that, so I fell silent, and after a while, we began to talk of other things. But I remembered what she had said for a long time afterwards, and it bothered me. I was starting to wonder if Daisy might have gone very quietly, very unnoticeably and very thoroughly insane.

---

_The journal of Doctor Catherine Faller, entry # 20 (continued):_

_People have actually accused me of being overly machine-like. They tell me I clearly don't feel anything, except for a need to have things my own way. If I felt something, they say, how could I treat them like I do? They sound like they thought it was impossible to act against your feelings._

_I do, though. All the time. I do things I hate myself for, because I think they're the right ones. And if they're not? Well, then I will at least have chartered my path with my mind, the instrument I trust the most…_

---

"And then you found out that she hadn't," Catherine said. "Or at least, that her being mad was part of something worse." She pushed a wine-soaked strawberry around her plate a few time before managing to spear it on her fork.

"Hmm?" Mac said, brooding over his cream pudding.

"Well, that _is_ where this story is going, isn't it?" Catherine said. "It turned out that she was a vampire or something, right? That all that stuff about living forever was for real."

Mac shook his head.

"I've Seen vampires," he said. "They're monsters. Dead things that walk. Daisy is neither, though yes, I do think she's taken her desire to survive and prosper alarmingly too far."

"What is she, then?" Catherine said.

"I really have no idea," Mac said, wrinkling his lined brow ever so slightly. "I will tell you as much as I can if you let me finish the story."

Catherine sighed. How she hated it when people couldn't get to the point. She supposed that it was good storytelling, but personally, she always checked the back of the book to see who the killer was before she started reading it…

"Eventually," Mac said, "I admitted to myself that I had little reason or ability to hold on to the house as a widower, so I sold it and moved into a retirement home – much to Daisy's annoyance, I'm afraid. Still, she kept coming to see me. It was on one of those occasions I first… Saw." He closed his eyes. "I remember she was leaving. She was just putting on her coat…"

---

"I'll come to see you again next week," she said, sweeping the black coat around herself like a knight strapping on his armour. Daisy never did do anything without drama. "Stay out of trouble, okay?"

"It's far too late to start staying out of trouble at my age," I said. "You get _into_ some trouble for once, you hear? Next week, I want to hear all about your sordid affair with your boss!"

"Ah, if only." She sighed and turned to leave.

I reached out to pick up a book I had lying on my bedside table, when the world spoke to me.

SEE, it said.

I blinked, rubbing my head. At my age, when you start hearing voices, you worry. Oh, I suppose you do that at any age, but at my age, you have a greater number of possible reasons to worry about.

SEE, the world said again.

I looked to Daisy to see if she had perhaps heard it, because it seemed too real, too _solid_ to be the first onset of some dementia.

She was standing by the door, in the process of opening it, and she was only barely human. Her body was filled with steel and wires, with microchips and fibre cable. I could see the machinery following her bones out into the limbs, burrowing itself into her organs, invading them and taking over them like some foreign conqueror. Worse, I could see that all of it, every strand of wire, every gear and chip, was connected, and traced its way up into her brain, where electricity crackled and commanded her body more closely, more mercilessly, than any body should ever be commanded.

The machines filled her like cancer, making her less than human, and she thought they made her free.

I could see all of it. How can I describe this? It wasn't like X-ray vision. It was like a dream, where you _see_ something, and it tells you all sorts of things, but afterwards you don't know exactly what it was you saw. I saw the truth of Daisy, but not with the best will in the world could I ever paint you a picture of what I saw.

"Daisy," I whispered, in an old man's wheeze.

She turned, her eyes large and scared. The lenses had been replaced by modifiable glass.

"Stop looking at me like that," she said.

"Daisy," I whimpered. "Daisy, what have you _done_ to yourself?"

She shook her head. I could hear tiny engines buzzing with every motion, could hear the squishing noise of dampeners smoothing it.

"Stop looking at me like that!" she repeated, louder this time, with an edge of hysteria.

"No… no…" I forced my feeble old muscles to push me out of my chair. "Oh, no, why did you do this, you didn't have to do this, there must have been some better way, there _must_ have…"

She looked around wildly, and in metallic pockets along her spine, sensory arrays started whirling.

"Who's doing this?" she snarled. "Damn it, this is across the line! Leave him out of it, whoever you are!"

I put my hand on her shoulder. I'm not really sure why, what I was hoping to accomplish. I only knew that I wanted to reach inside of her and make her right again, take back all that she had done to herself. Or all that I had done to her; that was really it, wasn't it? This was my failures coming back to haunt me, but who could have thought that I was even capable of causing so extravagant a disaster, doing such extreme harm?

She slapped my hand off of her. It felt like being hit by a wrecking ball. I was a frail old man, and she had made of herself a machine, perfect and powerful in its inhumanity. I lost my balance, fell to the floor. I gave off a shrill cry as my already aching muscles took the impact.

"Damn. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." She was breathing rapidly, in defiance of the processes that were already releasing chemicals into her blood to calm her down. This, in some strange way, soothed me. The machine in her was not as perfect as it thought it was. She could still feel.

"Daisy…" I whispered. "Please. It's all right. Don't leave. There must be something… something…"

"No. No!" She turned, slammed the door open. "I can't! You're _looking_ at me! I can't stand it!" She looked over her shoulder, her jaw tense, her eyes hard. "I'm sorry about this. Someone's doing it to us. But I'll take care of it. I promise."

Then she ran, leaving me to pick myself up. I only saw her once more after that, and that meeting was no more satisfying for either of us.


	4. Chapter 4

_The journal of Doctor Catherine Faller, entry # 20 (continued):_

_I didn't become a physician because I wanted to help people. I did it because I was interested in the human body, because it paid well, and because it seemed like as good a line of study as anything else._

_Some doctors get a God complex. They think they can save every patient. What can you say about me? What do you call someone who considers every patient beyond saving, until proven otherwise?_

_What do you call someone who sees someone who tries to convince himself that he can help, and wishes she could manage to see anything but self-delusion?_

---

"So, you were right," Catherine said. "Not a vampire." She took a sip of coffee. "Something a great deal more interesting, I'd say."

"Interesting?" Mac snorted. "I guess you could put it like that."

"Well, why not?" Catherine grinned. "What, _you've_ never wished that you didn't have to be so damn human?"

"No," Mac said. "Call me old-fashioned, because I am, but I consider human a good thing to be."

Catherine shrugged. As far as she was concerned, being human was the best of a number of bad alternatives.

"Well, she's still guilty of the capital sin, as I see it," she said. "She didn't _share_ that marvellous technology of hers with anyone. We could all have been cyborgs. But I guess she wanted to keep the power for herself." She sniffed. "Pathetic."

"Doctor Faller," Mac said patiently, "you might think you would enjoy the prospect of going the way of Daisy, but believe me, if you had been there, if you had seen it, you would have been as revolted as I was. Sacrificing everything that you are just to get rid of your human weaknesses… well, that's what one would call throwing out the baby with the bathwater."

"Perhaps," Catherine said. "So what do you think happened to her? Secret government project? Mad scientist? Deal with some kind of high-tech devil?"

"I don't think that matters," Mac said. "All I'd like to know is how it could be revoked."

"Mmm." Catherine spun her cup around on its plate. "Maybe you should finish the story before I start theorising wildly."

---

Daisy didn't come back next week, or the next. In the end, I went looking for her. It should have been easier than it was. I knew where she lived, and I knew where she worked. But no one answered when I rang her doorbell, and no matter how long I waited outside of her house, I never saw her come or go. I tried to catch her at her job, but somehow, she had always just stepped outside when I came to see her. In the end, her boss had stern words with me.

"I really don't know what your family situation is," he said. "She used to talk about her grandfather a lot, and then she just stopped. I don't know what you've done to her. I don't know what she has done to you. And I have no idea how she always seems to know that you're going to come by, but the fact is, every time you do, I'm left without a secretary for two hours. That is two hours when I don't perform at my peak. Two hours when I let the team down. Two hours when I fail the stockholders. I don't enjoy that. Please take your quarrel out of my office and keep it there."

I Saw him, and there was something off about him. No circuitry under the skin, no fibre-optic cables running alongside his nerves, just something glossy and artificial, like he had been manufactured instead of born.

"You're like her," I said.

"In that I put work before personal life, yes," he said. I couldn't make out any dishonesty in him, and I'm usually good at that sort of thing. Maybe he didn't even know what he was.

Weeks went by. I Saw other creatures, walking the streets as bold as you please, and I made some notes about them. I found that there was another man in my retirement home, an ex-Major in the army, who could See. He told me that it was our duty to keep our home and everyone else who lived there safe. I did not contradict him, and when he put me on sentry duty, I sat by the window for hours on end, just to make sure no people who were dead or artificial or animal entered the home. None ever did.

When I saw her again, it was on her terms. It was a quiet night, and I was taking a walk through the park to clear my head. I swear that the bench was empty when I walked past it, but then I heard her voice behind me, and when I turned around, she was sitting there.

The Sight wasn't with me; she looked the same as she always did. If it had happened before, I might have doubted the voice had ever spoken to me, doubted that the vision had been anything but an old man's dementia. But I had Seen a lot since then, and learned that there were others like me. I knew what I had Seen.

"I've been looking for you," I said.

"I know," she said. "I wasn't ready to see you."

I sat down on the bench next to her.

"I was hoping I'd find something," she said. "Some reference. Some tiny note on some obscure website. Some little trinket of information from some wand-waving bozo. There isn't anything. I don't know what's happening."

"Well, I don't either," I said. "It seems we're not quite normal, either of us." I smiled faintly. "But then, we already knew that, didn't we?"

She nodded.

"But something reached out and made me different," I said. "You made yourself different, didn't you?"

She looked straight at me.

"Yes."

"How?" I said. "How is it possible?"

"That's just the thing. There's no reason for anything to be impossible. There are no rules. They're just… restrictions. If you push, they yield a little. If you push harder, they yield some more. You can do anything. It's just a matter of how stubborn you are."

"And of the price you're willing to pay, to push away those restrictions," I said.

She looked down.

"Yeah. And that."

"Why did you do it?" I said. "All of this? What made you think _this_ was a reasonable price to pay?"

"Because people shouldn't have to die," she said. "Because people shouldn't be too weak to do anything they want. Because people shouldn't be held down by any rule not of their own making."

I shook my head. I didn't know how to meet such a strange argument. If someone argues against a rule, you can attempt to prove that the rule is just. But if someone argues against the very concept of rules, what do you say to them?

"But that _price_," I insisted. "Say that you're right. Say that people can really live forever and do anything they want. Would they still be people, if they did that? People _die_. People have _limits_. If you take away the limits, what's left? What has no limits?"

Daisy shrugged.

"God?" she suggested.

"Is that what you want to be? I think God is a pretty lonely fellow. Why would He have created mankind, if He wasn't absolutely desperate for company, any company?"

"It's moot, anyway," Daisy said. "I walk, I talk, I eat, I drink. I dream. I ache. I cry. I fuck. I'm human enough."

"Are you?" I said. "Where does the line go? Can you even understand what being human is now? When I first Saw you, you knocked me down."

"I didn't mean to…" Daisy began.

"I know. It's okay." I sighed. "But there was a moment, there, when it could have crossed your mind that other people are small and fragile compared to you, that we don't all have steel-enforced skeletons. And _it didn't_. I think you've stopped being human in the strictest sense. Or at least you will before long. Unless you turn back now."

"Turn back?"

"Undo whatever it was you did," I said. "Be human again. Come back to us."

"You're asking me to cripple myself!" she said.

"I'm asking you to save your soul."

She got up from the bench, scowling furiously. Her hands were tightened into fists by her sides.

"No! You don't understand anything. I shouldn't be like you, it's you who should be like me. Everyone should be more than human."

"Machines aren't more than human," I said. "And I have lived a long, full life, without having wires wrapped around my brain. What more could I ask for? What more could you? You don't need to make yourself a monster to live life to the fullest. Please? I'll help you. In any way I can. Just… stop it now. While you have the chance."

She frowned at me.

"It's much too late for that," she said. "A 'long, full life' isn't even nearly enough for me now." She started walking away from me.

"Daisy!" I shouted in desperation. "Do you want to die as a freak?"

"Stop calling me that!" She turned, black coat whipping around her. "My name is _Diana_! My name is Diana Helsing, and _I'll never die_!"

Then she was gone, swallowed by the night, and I was left contemplating the cost of failure.

---

_The journal of Doctor Catherine Faller, entry # 20 (continued):_

_Maybe stupid hope is part of being human. Maybe we all get to choose between weighing the odds and doing what's sensible, or deciding that what we need is possible to achieve._

_Wishful thinking isn't really an evolutionary no-no. After all, if you decide to be reasonable, you never even try. People who convince themselves that something can be done sometimes find that it actually can be._

---

Catherine counted out the money for the meal. The real challenge with these things was to figure out how little you could tip while making it look like you were bad at math as opposed to being a cheapskate.

"You see?" Mac said quietly.

Catherine sighed.

"Yeah. Actually, yeah. I _do_ think I see what you're getting at. But why don't you give me the full, angsty rundown?"

"She's going to live forever," Mac said. "Or at least she thinks she is, and I can't say I doubt her. She's going to walk around and become less and less human, but at the core she'll always be Daisy Brown. My granddaughter. The result of my weakness and my failures." He closed his eyes. "My disgrace won't end. It will live on forever, to torment countless generations yet to come."

"Oh, get over it," Catherine said. "Nothing ever _really_ ends. Nothing ever really begins, either. Why does she have to be your creation? Can't she be her mother's? Can't she be _your_ mother's? Time didn't start at your birth, you know."

Mac snorted, smiling faintly.

"Well, this is the only way I can see it, I'm afraid. I messed up. Because of me, my daughter destroyed herself. Because of her, my granddaughter turned herself into a monster. I could blame it on someone else, I suppose, but what would the point be? I did what I did, and this is the result."

Catherine shrugged. Everyone did what they did, and the result was rarely very nice.

"I don't know if I can help you," she said. "But I'm going to try. Not for your sake or anything. I'm just interested."

"Thank you," Mac said quietly.

"And I'd appreciate your help, too," Catherine said. "You wouldn't have to do anything. Just… See, right? Just tell me everything you See, and I'll consider that help enough."

"Life is very simple for you, isn't it, Doctor Faller?" Mac said.

Catherine snorted. She had known from the start that he was a fool.


End file.
